>Why does the Linux community tend to collaborate with e-mail lists?
I have a one-hour commute by train.
I have no Internet access during that time.
I do have a laptop.
A constant for most fora, mailing lists and newsgroups I have
frequented is that only one out of every 20 messages (if that) is
interesting. I spend most of my train time filtering the other 19
out. That's only possible on something local to my laptop, such as a
mail or newsspool. Most fora I've seen don't make for easy
wget(1)-targets.
Out of the interesting messages, maybe 1 in 50 is so important that
it's worth keeping. E-mail and news can just be dumped to a file;
that's much harder with forum messages. I know, some boards allow
tagging, but that isn't quite the same as having a local copy. What
happens when the forum goes away, or when the site admin is a bit too
overzealous doing a cleanup ?
As an example, I have about 500 saved articles from the linux-kernel
mailing list, going back to early 1998. I regularly use this as a
living reference on the kernel, general UNIX programming and coding
style/tricks. How many fora would you trust to still be around after
almost seven years ?
Many projects have IRC channels for 'live' interaction. That's not
quite my bag, but I do have a few IRC logs with (to me) extremely
useful info.
Others have made points I completely agree with. I am currently
subscribed to two dozen mailing lists, and it would really hurt my
productivity if they'd all have (not so) subtly differing user
interfaces, logins or search functions. E-mail is lightweight, it
will work in many more circumstances than a web browser will.
Some fora sure are pretty, and I've tried a few of them, but I've yet
to see one which saves time and effort over a mailing list. And in
the end, that's all that counts.
JDB.
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